Blogs

Latest Blogs

Help Improve Annual Reports

As the leading organisation representing individual investors, ShareSoc is called upon by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), to assist with their research on investor requirements. The FRC is the official body tasked with supervising the accounting profession in the UK, setting accounting standards and codes of practice for corporate governance. Their Financial Reporting Lab has asked for our help in obtaining feedback from our members in its project to research the usefulness of the current "principal risk and viability disclosures" in the ...

National Grid and Electric Cars

National Grid (NG.) have published a paper entitled “Future Energy Scenarios” which spells out the impact of future trends in energy consumption, and by implication how it might affect their business. For example, the forecast demand for electric cars might add 30% to peak electric power demand, thus requiring the equivalent of five Hinkley Point C nuclear plants. Even if people only charge their electric cars in off-peak periods, the additional demand could be very substantial. If you live in London, you ...

Performance Fees – Don’t You Just Hate Them?

I mentioned in a previous blog post the result of a performance incentive fee for the manager at British Smaller Companies VCT (BSV) which resulted in total fees of 6.9% of net assets last year. Another similar example is that of Proven VCT (PVN) who managed to do even better at 8.8% of assets for the same reason. This problem of excessive and perverse performance fees has recently been covered in the FCA’s “Asset Management Market Study” and in a very good ...

Our Risk, Their Gain: TD Direct & the FCA

Thursday last, I was somewhat shocked to receive the following missive from one of my brokers, TD Direct (now owned by Interactive Investor): The key paragraph is this: To ensure we maintain our ability to appropriately diversify client money across highly rated, strongly capitalised banks, our regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has given us, and other similar firms, permission to deposit some of our client monies in fixed term deposits for up to 95 days. This is a change to the current ...

Guide to ShareSoc’s new Events Page

As part of the redevelopment of ShareSoc's website, we have enhanced our directory of events. Our aim is that it should be the "go to" place for investors in the UK wishing to find out about interesting events relating to investment. We therefore list not only our own events, but any worthwhile investment related events from 3rd parties (subject to our editorial control). If you know of any upcoming event which we have not listed, please let us know. The main body of ...